Revitalized U.s. News Retilts The Media

As we keep seeing, from North to Bork, media is power. And so, if the pattern of media changes, the distribution of power can change.

The case has been made that there is a liberal tilt to the major media establishments. Of the eight big influentials that are said to set the national agenda, seven are considered to have a liberal mind-set: The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, Time and Newsweek. Only The Wall Street Journal is regarded as partly conservative.

Now, this does not mean that the seven Lib-Tilts sit around hatching plots. I repeat the term ''mindset.'' That's where the tilt comes from, a mind-set, occasionally in the ownership of the enterprise, but more often stemming from journalists' view of the world -- adversarial, anti- establishment, negative, self-righteous, unhappy marching adjectives of modern liberalism. It is mind-set that determines what's considered news and who gets to explain it.

But change is afoot. USA Today and Cable News Network may have joined the club; while neither is conservative, they are not liberal. And consider U.S. News & World Report. It had been around a long time: fact-oriented, trend- oriented but never trendy, solid, useful, sometimes boring (U.S. Snooze). It was generally conservative, but never regarded as a big player when it came to influencing national opinion.

Then, three years ago, zillionaire Mortimer Zuckerman bought U.S. News. Editors and consultants have been hired, quit, hired, unhired. The layout has been souped up. New columnists were hired. It has become a much more interesting magazine. But behind the hustle-bustle, something important is aborning. The magazine is on the threshold of becoming a major soldier in the opinion wars. In that combat, U.S. News will not be one of the liberal troops. Look at the people who write signed opinion pieces. Zuckerman describes himself as a ''pragmatic conservative''; he's tough on foreign policy and economics, liberal on some social matters. Editor David Gergen, ex-White House communications director, was banged upon by conservatives as too liberal when in Reaganland, but he, too, is hard-nosed on most issues. Richard Perle, former assistant secretary of defense, writes a monthly column. He is a hawk. Michael Kramer, recently politics editor for New York magazine, writes weekly. He has a liberal sensibility -- and yet recent pieces were pro-Bork and pro- contra. One might describe his politics as ''neoconservative with a human face.''

All this does not mean that U.S. News will become a Johnny-One-Note journal of right-of-center opinion. It will remain a newsmagazine based on solid journalistic practice.

But its mind-set and position in the media constellation have changed. On balance, it may be somewhat more liberal than it used to be. But because its conservatism is more modern and more relevant, the magazine is likely to get a seat at the big table whose players shape the national culture. That will be a step toward balancing the media equation at a time when media, more than ever, means influence.